I recently caught up with Sammy James Jr., lead singer of garage rock phenomenon The Mooney Suzuki as he and the rest of the band were driving from New Orleans to Atlanta on the most recent leg of their perpetual tour. The hardest working band in show biz, famous for their energetic stage show, has shared the bill with the Hives, The Strokes and the Sahara Hot Night in the past year of continuous touring. The band who takes their name from the grandfathers of techno, Malcom Mooney and Damo Suzuki, frontmen for the German band Can have been playing their own version of rocket fueled 60's inspired rock since forming in 1997 in NYC. The group was formed when art school students at Parsons and Cooper Union met through an ad lead singer Sammy James Jr. posted in a local record shop. The band has recently been gaining media attention for their second full length album "Electric Sweat" currently available on Gammon Records. The single "Woke Up This Mornin" was featured in the season finale of "The Osbourne's" and the single "In a Boy's Mind" has been gaining airplay on radio stations across the country. They may not be a household name yet but they are working hard on it.

MISSY: What was the first album that you ever bought?

SAMMY JAMES JR: The first album I ever had was Van Halen 1984 but I don't think that i bought it. The first album I walked up to the store and bought was Tommy. I knew that I wanted pinball wizard so I walked up to the counter and asked for the album with pinball wizard and they gave me Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy instead. So I guess the Who's Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy was the first album I ever bought. Well rock and roll album, I was a big fan of the Sesame Street albums when I was little.

M: You were influenced by the 60's bands like The MC5, The Yardbirds and the Stones, but I read an interview where you were asked what 7 albums you would take with you if you were stranded on a desert island and they were all hip hop. What do you listen to?

SJJ: Absolutely everything. It is like with food you can't eat the same thing all of the time. So when I first started getting into music or playing music I started getting into 60's or blues rock and then you know when you are a kid you get into something and then you move on and you are like 'I hate this stuff now, I am into this now' and then you get into other stuff. I was into a lot of non blues music and experimental music. There are certain people that are like if there is music around, music is just kind of part of their environment but for people that are into music I think you eventually get into everything. Every possible genre has what's great in it and what's terrible in it. There are a lot of things that influence us musically indirectly. like the Beastie Boys. We don't have samples or rap in our band but we are directly inspired by them, even though it is not the same music. Then there are some bands that you like or love that have nothing to do with what you sound like, like we are Frank Zappa fans but there are no trace elements of his music evident in ours.

M: There are so many bands coming out of NYC right now like The Strokes, Interpol, Ryan Adams, etc., what is it like to be an NYC band right now? Is it kind of like being a Seattle band from the early 90's?

SJJ: For us it's kind of, I don't want to say annoying but we have been making music in New York for a long time. There was a time when we would send Mooney Suzuki tapes and packages to magazines, labels and booking agents trying to get something going for ourselves and nobody could care and then we finally did get something rolling for ourselves and then other bands got rolling. You have seen what happened to the Strokes and then now all of a sudden you have bands that couldn't get a gig four years ago that are now being signed to major labels and on the covers of magazines and stuff. I am not saying that a lot of the bands that are out there now are bad. Like the bands getting a lot of attention are not bad. I am saying that there have always been bands in the city that are worthy of attention and didn't get attention. For us, now we are getting attention and that's great but we were around four years ago so we know what it is like to be a New York band that doesn't get attention. The hot thing is going to be something else tomorrow anyway so if you are an artist in any field and you hope to endure a lifetime career in entertainment or art you have to get used to sometimes you are in and sometimes you are out. If you are true to what you do it shouldn't matter if you are in or you are out. You love to do what you do and you do it. What art or public entertainer is popular for the entire duration of their career?

M: You guys have been together since 1997, have you always had the same sound? How have you evolved musically?

SJJ: There was a little more of a pop element at the beginning, a little more of a jangle to the guitar i guess, originally I was trying to sound exactly like the Velvet Underground. As the live show started becoming more what it is now it became apparent that it was kind of a waste of time on stage to do the pop stuff because the more energetic blues stuff was so much more effective and just felt much more right.

M: I am glad that you brought up the live shows, they are pretty legendary, do you prepare for them? do you have any trademark moves or do you just let the music take over?

SJJ: Certainly, we definitely have trademark moves. Sometimes they evolve over longer periods of time but we look at the stage show as an ever developing martial art that we are constantly trying to master. It is exactly like Bruce Lee developing his own discipline but I don't know if we will ever give actual classes or anything. No rockstar classes.

M: You guys have said that you started a band to get girls? Do you have any groupie stories?

SJJ: We never said that we played music to get girls. It was a facetious answer that i gave to a silly question then the silly question was edited out. But that is not entirely untrue either. It is certainly a large part of the motivation that anybody has for going through the difficult beginning stages of what ever their craft happens to be. To attract a member of the opposite sex, I think very few people involved in anything could say that that had nothing to do with their motivation. People that deny that are full of shit.

Of course we get groupies but they tend to be men in their forties that want to talk about rare soul singles and how we remind them of when they were in high school. We have obsessive old men groupies but at the end of the day you appreciate them as much as you do their younger more attractive versions.

M: You have pretty much been on tour for the past three years straight, do you have any crazy touring stories?

SJJ: Do you have a few days? Well the most recent one involves this converted mini school bus that we had been touring in for the past few years. When you tour as much as we do it is going to take a toll on the vehicle. You know the vehicle had had it's rough times and on this tour it started to run into some problems and then some real problems. We had the engine and the transmission replaced so many times that we started to think that it wasn't worth it to put any more work into it, it may be time to put it to rest, put it out to pasture and shoot it in the leg or whatever they do. So we realized that it was time to let this one go and we had three exits to go and we thought well let's just see if it will make it for these three exits so we won't have to call a tour bus. We happened to have a copy of the Grateful Dead album that had the song "Truckin'" on it. So we were blasting "Truckin" in this van on it's last legs, driving on the shoulder with a plume of smoke coming out of the vehicle with bolts and gears rocketing out and oil squirting everywhere and crossing our fingers hoping that the bus will make it to the next exit then we lose steering we heard a crash and some essential part of the engine falls out and now there is so much smoke that we can't even see and then the vehicle without steering or brakes or what appears to be even an engine right now is coasting into the guide rail we are all screaming "abandon ship" while "Truckin" is blaring out the windows. We get out of the bus and we see that it is on fire and realize that it would be very bad for it to consume all of our equipment and essentially all of our worldly possessions at the time. We had to hose it down with a fire extinguisher and there was just this giant mass of flames, smoke and fire extinguisher fluid.

M: Was it like losing a member of the family, having spent so much time on the tour bus?

SJJ: We knew that we were going to put it down after that trip so we were taking all of these pictures and it was very sad and then we had all of our cameras out and were taking pictures of it on fire. It was not the first vehicle we have been through and it definitely won't be the last, it was sad, but we go through vehicles and band members and labels and that is just part of the road you are on literally. You know there is the real road that the band travels and then there is the metaphoric road. You brush yourself off and move on.

M: What is your favorite city to play in?

SJJ: Well that is hard to say, I would say NYC, it's not even hometown pride so much as I moved to NYC to be a musician because New York is always where I wanted to be. It depends on what your taste is, I mean I love playing L.A. I love playing Chicago. Austin, there are a lot of great cities but I will answer New York.

M: You have played in Portland twice in the past year, do you have any stories about playing Portland?

SJJ: We like the hamburger shaped Birthday cake that you can get at the Fred Meyer with the French Fries on the side. It was our one bass players last show in Seattle so we bought the cake in Portland and took it to the show in Seattle and made him eat it on stage like a hamburger. We made him dip the ladyfinger french fries in the cup of red frosting that comes with it too. I think that thing belongs in the MOMA. Portland is just a cool town, it is a nice counter culture town without the flakiness of San Diego or San Francisco.

M: Who is your favorite band to tour with?

SJJ: That is a difficult question to answer because our last few tours have been with THE most fun awesome bands to tour with. We thought the Hives were the best band to tour with and then we toured with the Sahara Hot Night and we couldn't decide which band was cooler. Now we are on tour with the Strokes and they are awesome. So I would have to say the Hives, the Sahara Hot Nights and the Strokes are a tie.

M: You all went to art school in New York, did any of you finish or did you give up school for the band?

SJJ: Yeah, Graham Tyler graduated Parsons. Our drummer Augie WIlson, who was our original drummer, he graduated Cooper Union and then moved to Portland to work in design for a few years. We would always stay with him when we were in Portland. Then he moved back to the city shortly after 9/11 and we needed a drummer at the time, so now he is back in the band so that is great. I am the only one that didn't graduate.

M: What were you studying?

SJJ: Graphic design.

M: Do you still do design work in your spare or do you concentrate on the music?

SJJ: Augie does some design work, Graham does a bit. We all still do it in the sense that we do all the art work for the band, all the t-shirts, all the album covers. Anything design oriented for our band we do. Our label doesn't have a design department and we wouldn't let them do it anyways.

M: Who would you most like to work with?

SJJ: We would love to do a film with Stanley Kubrick and Orson Wells, a record with Brian Wilson and Phil Specter, and work on an album cover with Saul Bass.

M: How tired are you of answering questions about Can since you took your name from the lead singers last names, Malcom Mooney and Damo Suzuki?

SJJ: I would rather answer a direct question about Can than answer, 'so what's up with that name?' I love Can, I think they are a great band and I am not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. If our name or the nature of our name creates some kind of curiosity or attention then that's great. That is actually why we stuck with it at first. It was a joke but we started getting press and gigs and stuff because of the name so we thought we would stick with this.

M: What do you think of digital music swapping? Do you think that it impacted word of mouth and helped to get the word out about the Mooney Suzuki?

SJJ: Well the internet certainly impacted the growth of our band because when we started in late 1997 it wasn't nearly as ubiquitous a part of peoples lives as it is now and I remember a definite plateau shift toward when we started doing an e-mail list. We had such a noticed shift in activity for us. I think now as far as music swapping makes it more difficult for "alternative" for lack of a better term or college bands to sell actual records because kids in college have access to a high speed network and can download whatever they want and never have to buy a record. Where as musical genres like country or jazz don't have that problem. But we are so interested in packaging anyways that we hope that our fans feel the same way. We try to make anything Mooney oriented have such compelling packaging that people will want the music but people will want the packaging as well.

M: Do you own an MP3 Player?

SJJ: My IPOD is the center of my life. I LOVE my IPOD. It is ideal, the packaging was amazing. Unfortunately I only have the 5 gig but the 20 gig is on the top of my Christmas list.

M: For the meantime will touring still be the main way to spread the gospel about the Mooney Suzuki?

SJJ: Definitely, the more we tour the larger the audiences get, the more laps we take around the U.S. and definitely the bigger acts we open for impacts the audience. The first time we played San Francisco was for 20 people the last time we played San Francisco was opening for the Strokes to 6,000 people so it is satisfying to see the impact of touring. it is a good feeling to go from point a to where we are now.

yeah Missy.. I saw the link to that the other day and I was all.. "HOT.." i met those guys a while back in ATL.. they were really nice. But in a drunken haze I thought the singer was actually Rik Ocasek from the Cars.. ahah i gotta cut back. I'd like to see some more pics if you took any?